Dean of the College and Historical Studies Program Present

“The Only Hindu Lawyer in the United States:” Sakharam Ganesh Pandit and the Afterlives of US vs Thind

In 1923, the United States Supreme Court issued its landmark decision in United States vs Bhagat Singh Thind, in which it held that a “high caste Hindoo of full Aryan blood” did not fit the “common man’s understanding of whiteness,” and therefore was ineligible to citizenship. This decision allowed the US Department of Labor, which at the time housed the Bureau of Naturalization, to send out Notices of Petitions to Cancel Citizenship to the nearly 70 other South Asians who had been naturalized as US citizens since 1900. While some of these denaturalizations were resolved in the bowels of the administrative state, a few dozen were heard in federal court following habeas corpus petitions. These hearings illustrate the degree to which Thind linked the federal government’s power to strip citizenship with the legal construction of race, as well as how those subjected to that power attempted to use the law to preserve their citizenship in spite of, not because, of their imposed race. This talk argues that the federal government, in allowing a few notable exceptions to retain their citizenship while still being categorized as non-white, both crystallized legal definitions of race and refined its power to denaturalize and deport

---

For more information, call 845-758-6822, or e-mail [email protected].

Time: 5:00 pm EST/GMT-5

Location: Olin Humanities, Room 102

Subscribe: Save this Event: Subscribe / .ics File